Pages

Thursday, January 30, 2014

Russell (Christian Bale) is a steel worker who lives in the Rust Belt with
his brother Rodney (Casey Affleck),
an angry young soldier who keeps getting ‘stop lossed’ back into the Iraq
war.Rodney has slipped into perpetual
gambling in between his tours, and has resorted to borrowing money from John
Petty (Willem Defoe), an underground
boxing promoter who uses him in his fights.

One night, Russell visits John to offer
him some money for Rodney’s debt, and on the way home has a car accident and ends
up in jail.When he is eventually
released, Rodney is in deeper than ever and goes missing whilst trying to earn
money in a more dangerous, yet profitable bare-knuckle fighting circuit with
the psychotic Harlan DeGroat (Woody
Harrelson).This leads Russell to
the Northeast to try and find his troubled brother…

The film is essentially a collection of
metaphors that combine to create a damning critique of a bleak 21st
century America.

Russell spends his time at the steel
mill where he proudly works, a location that has many symbolic functions.The rusted, functional architecture is a
visual representation of the traditional American heartland that he feels keeps
the country together; whilst shots of rusted steel, burning furnaces and
billowing smoke towers reinforce the underlying tension and violence of the
story.

Monday, January 27, 2014

At its heart, We Steal Secrets is a story about stories.The stories that we tell ourselves and the
stories that we are told by authority figures.The two men that are at the heart of these stories are both defiant and
reactionary and both are trying to reveal an uncomfortable truth about the
world they live in: One about the government and one about the military.

In 1991, Julian Assange was arrested in
Australia for hacking a Canadian telecommunications company.He eventually moved to Europe and founded the
website Wikileaks, which had revolution as
its mission statement. At first he
presented the idea that the site was populated with dedicated recruits that
were organized and had their fingerprints all over the digital world, yet it
was really just Julian working solo with a handful of mobile phones and IP
addresses.

The unique selling point of the site was
that it allowed users to dump unedited private data into the public domain with
complete anonymity.The software was
designed to attract corporate, government and military whistleblowers to give
information to a protected electronic forum, which could then be disseminated
worldwide in order to encourage radical reform of corrupt institutions. Assange
always believed that the truth would set us free.

Sunday, January 26, 2014

Films that are adapted from stage shows
usually have two things in common; they contain talented ensemble casts and
they revolve around a located family tragedy.The new film from talented TV producer John Wells delivers both in large helpings in a blistering summer
month in Osage County, Oklahoma.

The story begins with a confessional
between the poetic elderly patriarch Beverley (Sam Shepherd) and his new Native American maid Johnna (Misty Upham).He explains to her that she will mainly need
to look after his wife Violet (Meryl
Streep), who is suffering from mouth cancer and addicted to pills.

Bev then goes missing one day, which
prompts the return of their three daughters Barbara (Julia Roberts), Karen (Juliette
Lewis) and Ivy (Julianne Nicholson)
– who each bring their prospective complicated love lives with them.The resulting narrative twists all over as
the family unleashes all manner of dark family secrets and pent-up darkness on
each other almost all within the confines of the family home. A beautifully staged soap opera that plays out in three acts...

Even though the plot is fanciful and
excessive (essentially, all of the characters reveal a secret in turn over the
space of two hours) it is a joy to watch due to the calibre of the acting
talent – Chris Cooper plays a great rugged Midwest
republican; Juliette Lewis plays up for the trashy and superficial
middle-sister – but the two that have been rightly highlighted for award
recognition are Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep: Onscreen arguments haven’t
been this fun since Kate Winslet and
Leo DiCaprio in Revolutionary Road.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Documentaries about recent
political/cultural history often have an internal dichotomy that shapes
audiences viewing experience:viewers
remember the beginning and the end of an event, yet normally miss all of the important
details that happen in between.This
gives documentaries an important socio-historical function, but at the same
time can provoke heartbreaking empathy as viewers watch events unfold towards
an inevitable conclusion of which they are already aware.

The
Square tells the personal
story of the Egyptians who witnessed the revolution of 2011 and the fall of
Hosni Mubarak – the president/dictator who held power for 30 years.The three main characters are: Khalid, a
British-Egyptian actor who leaves London to join the revolution; Magdy, a
member of the Muslim Brotherhood and a religious democrat; and Ahmed, an
articulate activist who believes in fierce and independent opposition to
authoritarian rule.There are also a
number of other brave and dedicated men and women from different backgrounds
who all predominantly and profoundly agree that an informed electorate should
decide the future of Egypt.

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

On 21st February 2012, four
women entered the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow dressed in bright
clothes and neon balaclavas and sang a protest song, interrupting a church
service.This performance has since
become a global news story with all kinds of people claiming that the event has
become a symbol for something much larger than itself. Some see it as a return
to Soviet religious persecution, some as a feminist call-to-arms, or an
anti-Putin protest, or punk-terrorism… A new documentary tries to tell the
story of the build up to the notorious act and then the aftermath and trial
that came of it from all different points of view.

The main players in the scandal are
Nadia, Masha and Katia – three intelligent, articulate, middle-class feminists
who were put on trial for ‘disrupting society with an act of hooliganism [that
is] motivated by religious hatred’.They
see what they did as simply “metaphor and art” – something that the state
simply doesn’t understand.The
filmmakers give the women each a human backstory, something that has been
refused of them by the press, and it is explained how they grew up interested
in conceptual art and human rights.

Monday, January 20, 2014

For the past 60 years, New York has
enjoyed a mythical status concerning bohemian artists and radical art
exhibitions.From Andy Warhol and his
Pop Art Studio, to Jackson Pollock and his moody abstract expressionist drip
paintings – New York has always been a centre for avant-garde artists.No surprise then that it eventually became
home to Ushio Shinohara; an eccentric neo-dadaist from Japan.

Shinohara gained attention in his home
country for creating large found object sculptures that resembled the Pop Art
that was thriving in the USA.He also
created his trademark ‘boxing paintings’ that he would create by dipping boxing
gloves in paint and having a fight with a canvas.He then settled in New York in 1969 only to
meet his future wife Noriko, an art student.

The documentary, that has been lovingly
filmed by Zachary Heinzerling, explores how the couple go about creating their
individual art works, as well as telling a brief history of their relationship
through animated sequences based on Noriko’s cartoon character Cutie.The film culminates in a joint exhibition
that is comprised of a main room full of Ushio’s anarchic ‘junk’ sculptures and
an original backroom full of paintings of Cutie tenderly created by Noriko.

Sunday, January 19, 2014

Fragile
X syndrome is a hereditary learning disability that causes a combination of
learning, social, language, attentional, emotional, and behavioral problems.The name comes from a deficiency in the X
chromosome – something that males have one of (XY) and females have two of
(XX), meaning that it generally causes more problems in males.The condition is the genetic equivalent of
behavioural autism, effecting 1 in 4000 males and 1 in 8000 females with
varying severity.Mission to Lars is the story of one of those males.

Tom Spicer was diagnosed with Fragile X
when he was in his teens and has led him to live in a care home called Bystock
Court.His younger brother Will became a
filmmaker and his older sister Kate became a journalist.When his siblings realized that they had
begun to grow apart in their adulthood, they decided that they would give Tom
an adventure.One that he had spoken
about for as long as they could remember:to meet Lars.

Friday, January 17, 2014

I recently wrote an article about the representation
of the Iraq War in Hollywood fiction and how American filmmakers had failed
to reflect the long drawn-out conflicts in enough of their cinema.For such a profoundly important subject
matter, it surprises me how little fiction writers had explicitly written about
it.

The opposite is true of documentary
films – relying heavily on televisual broadcasting conventions, a huge number
of non-fiction films were made to show ‘the realities’ of war that in fact did
nothing more than over-saturate the audience with scenes of conflict and
horror.Dirty Wars is a work that combines Rick Rowley’s artful
cinematography with Jeremy Scahill’s relentless determination to tell a story
to create a harrowing, yet personal film about the last 10 years of American
history.

The story that Scahill is trying to tell
starts with a nighttime raid conducted by the United States army on a house in
Gardez where an extended Afghan family is having a celebration.That night, 7 people were killed including
one man’s wife, sister and niece.He
later describes how the soldiers dug the bullets out of the bodies and
disappeared back into the night – later a NATO press release would inaccurately
described the fatalities as ‘honour killings’ carried out by the family on
their own women.Scahill testifies about
this incident to the US congress but none of the congressman bother to show up…

Much to everyone’s delight, this last
year has been widely accepted to have been even better for cinema…I have already written about my ten
favourite mainstream films, but today is the day where Hollywood insiders
announce their nominations for the most prestigious awards ceremony of the year
– the Oscars.

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

If there was one good thing about the
financial crisis of 2007/8, then it is the abundance of good cinema that has come in its wake.There have been a
number of financial thrillers that have been directly inspired by the events:
some of them gripping and insightful, like Margin
Call and Too Big To Fail, some of
them not so good, like Wall Street: Money
Never Sleeps and Arbitrage.There have also been some excellent
documentaries: Inside Job, Hank:
5 Years From The Brink, and The
Flaw.The Wolf Of Wall Street is definitely the best (black) comedy to be
inspired by the crisis and is probably one of the funniest films of the year.

The story follows the rise and fall of
Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his brokerage firm Stratton
Oakmont.Belfort is introduced as a
hungry new broker at the highly prestigious investment bank L.F. Rothschild
where he learns to cold-call rich clients and sell them stock.He loses his job in Black
Monday and gets a new job selling so-called ‘penny shares’ in backyard
small-businesses to working class people who think they can make easy
money.The respectable investment
bankers make 1% commission on every transaction but sales in penny shares earn
50% commission.This factor leads
Belfort to start his own company with a sycophantic, greedy crack-smoker called
Donny (Jonah Hill) and trade higher and higher volumes of high-commission
trades to vastly growing profits.

Monday, January 13, 2014

Exposé documentaries, of all subject
matters, are usually relegated to television schedules.There is something inherent within the
televisual medium that perfectly propagates hour-long reporting of a scandal or
a tragedy that has evolved over a clear legacy of broadcast news /
non-fiction.This proud heritage makes
it even more poignant when an obvious exposé with such a televisual structure
and subject matter crosses over to the cinema.

Blackfish tells the story of Tilikum, a
12,000-pound Orca Whale that performs at SeaWorld.He was captured in the wild around Iceland in
1983 when he was just 2ft long and immediately transported to a small aquarium
in Canada.After a few years of
captivity he was involved with the death of a trainer so was sold to SeaWorld,
Orlando where he has been ever since.Since he has been there though he has been involved in the death of two
further people.

Sunday, January 12, 2014

If questioned, most people would say
that they went to the cinema in order to be entertained, and to laugh; or
thrilled, and to be amazed or tricked into thinking that one outcome would
occur in a story and then be pleasantly surprised when it turns out that an
alternate outcome is more satisfying.The new film from Turner
prizewinning
director Steve McQueen tells the harrowing and brutal true story of Solomon
Northup, a free man sold into slavery in 1840s America.

Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor) was a
lower-middle class carpenter living with his wife and children in Saratoga New
York.Here he one day meets two
travelling musicians who convince him to go to Washington to earn some money in
a circus as he is a skilled fiddle player.Here he is drugged, beaten and forced into slavery under the name
‘Platt’ and is transported down river to the South to be mercilessly sold.

At first he is bought by the relatively
(!) sympathetic slaveholder ‘Master’ Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch) and forced to
work with his carpentry skills.Here he
meets the stupid and sadistic Tibeats (Paul Dano) who humiliates him at every
opportunity.When an argument leads to
Tibeats bringing some men to try and lynch Solomon, Ford is forced to transfer
him to the drunken and violent Edwin Epps’ plantation where he has to pick
cotton for years in an atmosphere of random violence and cruelty.He is finally rescued with the help of a
white Canadian worker (Brad Pitt) who manages to send a letter to Solomon’s
family and friends in the North, who travel down to rescue him.

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

The award nominations for the BAFTAs have been announced. It is mostly accepted that 2013 has been a really good year for films and the awards season is looking like it could be quite unpredictable.It is easy to dismiss the awards culture as vacuous and elitist, but it is undeniable that they help to shape the next couple of years of interest within the industry so it is worth keeping an eye on.Some notable categories are:

Sunday, January 5, 2014

The first great film with a 2014 UK
release goes to David Russell for his quirky follow up to last year’s Academy
Award darling, Silver
Linings Playbook.A sexy ‘70s heist
film with a smooth and jazzy soundtrack that essentially updates the Oceans Eleven model for the more urbane
2013/14 audiences.

The film is basically a pair of love
triangles between four characters:Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale), a small-time conman that hustles
people with the promise of large loans that never materialize; Sydney Prosser
(Amy Adams), his new girlfriend that joins the scams by pretending to be a
wealthy British royal; Rosalyn Rosenfeld (Jennifer Lawrence), Irving’s wife and
the mother of his child who likes to drink and be the centre of attention; and Richie
DiMaso (Bradley Cooper) an FBI agent who is trying to uncover corruption and is
falling for Sydney (who he thinks is called Edith).

The backdrop of all of the romance is
that Richie catches Irving and Sydney attempting to commit fraud so he forces
them to help him in setting up a bribery bust with the mayor of New Jersey
Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner) and other politicians.The plan originally involves offering money
for much needed infrastructure development and ends up involving casino mobs
and mysterious Middle Eastern Sheiks that are trying to reap the benefits off
gambling licenses.

Friday, January 3, 2014

It is hard to
review a film that has been so widely criticised by the majority of film
critics:If you agree, then you run the
risk of seemingly following the pack; if you disagree then you run the risk of
being smugly contrary.It makes it even
worse when the film is written by one of your own personal literary heroes. And I've had this film on my radar for months

I’ve been a
massive fan of Bret Easton Ellis’ work for nearly 15 years.His ever-widening fictitious universe is
wonderfully complex and the experience of reading (and rereading) his
fascinating novels is incredibly rewarding due to the strange boundaries of new
each book.Characters reappear in
different books having relationships with unexpected people, and his world is
full of casual drugs and casual sex.The
dominant theme that flows throughout seems to be ironic and ambivalent
misunderstanding between friends and enemies.

The Canyons is the story of
trust-fund rich twenty-something Christian (James Deen) who is funding a movie that
his girlfriend Tara (Lindsay Lohan) is loosely involved with.The lead role in the film has been promised
to Ryan (Nolan Funk), who is dating Christian’s assistant Gina (Amanda
Brookes).We first meet the four over an
expensive looking dinner where Christian reveals that he likes to introduce
random couples (‘hook-ups’) he has found online into his and Tara’s sex
life.This seems to upset Ryan somewhat,
and we soon find out that he has been having an affair with Tara.As Christian begins to suspect the affair he
becomes increasingly paranoid towards Tara and the motivations behind producing
the movie.